Looking Back on 2017 & Celebrating in 2018

Dear Friends,

Happy holidays! As we near the end of 2017 and the beginning of 2018, we can all take pride in where we have stood, met, rallied and marched in this challenging year. For many of us, the year began with the women’s march, one of the largest marches in our nation’s history, with well over a million participants from every state in the union. Participants marched for women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, civil rights, immigrant and refugee rights, workers’ rights, for environmental protections, and so much more. Many more rallies and marches followed on these and other issues, in the streets, in the airports, at the courthouses, and the steps of City Hall, the state Capitol Dome, and the halls of Congress, among other places. Early in the year, over 5,000 youths in our area spontaneously organized themselves at their schools to turn out with a message to resist hate and promote respect for our diversity.

We have written letters, sent post-cards, e-mailed, tweeted, and made so many calls to the Congressional Switchboard and White House that we jammed up the lines when defending healthcare access for those who need it most. We have met with members of our City and County Councils, state legislature, and Congress, and turned out at their hearings and town hall meetings to protect all our rights. We have collaborated and coordinated our civic engagement across many communities and issues for maximum impact, and strengthened both our communities and our democracy in so doing.

We have registered people to vote, organized and participated in multilingual candidate forums and ballot parties, and helped to get out the vote. We have worked toward culture change, a culture where civic engagement is natural, accessible, and encouraged in culturally sensitive and linguistically available ways, in settings that we trust. And we are making a difference. Though we have seen Ku Klux Klan members joining with Nazis to send their messages of division and bigotry, and attacks on Muslims, Sikhs, temples, synagogues and churches, we have seen many more of us standing up for the rights of all people and celebrating our diversity. We are going deeper, to challenge not just monuments to men who defended slavery, but institutional and structural racism, to form a more perfect union.

At the beginning of the year, I quoted President Obama when he said “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” It remains as true now as it was before. It has been an honor to work for the changes we want as ACRS’s executive director these past 22 years, and a privilege to stand shoulder to shoulder with you, with our staff, our board, volunteers, and partners in the community and social justice movement. I look forward to continuing the work with you over the coming year, and celebrating ACRS’ 45th anniversary throughout 2018 with you. I will retire from ACRS on October 27, 2018, the day we will celebrate the 45th anniversary at our annual gala. I hope you will join us in celebrating what we have built together, and the changes we are making together, because the best is yet to come.

Sincerely,

Diane Narasaki
Executive Director

P.S. We look forward to sharing the stories of our 45 years with you each month. Please let us know if you have a favorite memory or story to share by emailing 45years@acrs.org.